


Over the Rainbow

by faithinthepoor



Series: Once Upon a Time [15]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-24 03:51:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/630076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faithinthepoor/pseuds/faithinthepoor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during the episode We are Both</p>
            </blockquote>





	Over the Rainbow

**Author's Note:**

> In my series this follows my [Fairytale Drabbles](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618763), [Mirror Mirror](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618771), [This Provincial Life](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618775), [Viviane or Nimue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618809), [Dreams and Wishes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/618851), [All the Better To….](http://archiveofourown.org/works/619484), [Magic Keys](http://archiveofourown.org/works/619497), [Curiouser and Curiouser](http://archiveofourown.org/works/619514), [Snow Blind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/620280), [Spinning Straw](http://archiveofourown.org/works/620288), [Wooden Hearts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/621128), [Poisoned](http://archiveofourown.org/works/622526), [True Love and Other Curses](http://archiveofourown.org/works/625038) and [Spellbound](http://archiveofourown.org/works/628806)

She is definitely not in Kansas any more. Well to be more accurate she is not in Maine. She could say that she is not in Storybrooke but she is not actually sure that Storybrooke is real. She is not sure about much any more. This all feels very much like a dream but she knows it can’t be. Her dreams are simply not this bizarre. 

Her dreams don’t involve fairytales and magic. She is an adult who has long since moved past such things and to be honest she’s not even sure she ever believed in fairytales. It’s probably the result of being abandoned at birth. Some children may have turned to fantasies to protect them from the harsh reality of being unwanted but she was never like that. Sure she sometimes prayed or crossed her fingers for luck and even at her last birthday she made a wish when she blew out the candle on her pathetic cake for one but she never really believed any of that would work.

It turns out that she was wrong. It is almost impossible for her to believe but magic, fairytales, wishes – it’s all real. It all matters. She thinks back to her birthday and wonders if she should have been more careful with her wish. It some ways it wouldn’t have mattered. Apparently nothing about her life matters. Her entire existence has been about leading her back to a group of strangers who decided, before her birth, that she was going to save them from their fate. 

One of those people is here with her now, wherever this is. This person looks exactly like a woman that she knows, a woman she considered to be her friend, but apparently they are not that person anymore. She misses her friend. She misses the things that she knew.

Emma didn’t realise it but she used to know a lot of things. For a start she used to know who she was. She wasn’t much, she was flawed and she had made a lot of wrong choices, but Emma Swan was Emma Swan. She was unwanted, she was unloved, she had made mistakes and she had paid the price and she had used all of that to her advantage. She channelled her losses and mistakes into her work and she was a good bounty hunter. She was built for that. She was a far better bounty hunter than she ever was a sheriff. 

She was never meant to decide on the guilt or innocence of others. Her glass house was way too fragile for that and the concept failed to play into her world view. As far as she was concerned everyone was guilty of something. It was part of what suited her about being a bounty hunter – there was no judgment, just an automatic assumption of guilt. 

If her role as sheriff had felt like a joke she doesn’t know how to describe her new roles. She has heartily and vocally attempted to reject the role of saviour but even it is more acceptable than the idea that she is a princess. 

Her parents were meant to be lowlife junkies or petty crims. The best case scenario she had ever come up with was that she was dumped by some teenaged girl who had concealed her pregnancy. She never once thought they regretted giving her up and she actually thought she had come close to understanding them when she had given up her own child. It was a decision she had been comfortable with and she had not even experienced remorse until Henry showed up on her doorstep and turned her life upside down.

Sometimes she hates Henry for that. Now would be one of those times. If he could have just left well enough alone she would be helping to put scumbugs in jail rather than being imprisoned herself. If only he had been content to accept the fact that she didn’t want him Emma’s world would still make sense.

It would be easy to lay all of this at Henry’s feet, and even though she loves him there are moments when she does just that, but she knows that in a way he had as little to do with her fate as she did. This madness started long ago. It was written. It was fucking prophesised. This is not the sort of thing that happens to normal people.

Apparently she is not normal. She comes from a magical land of dragons and fairies and boys made of wood. Her parents are about as far from lowlifes as you can get. They are royalty. They are noble and respected. Their people believe in them and in an attempt to save their people her parents sacrificed their only child. 

This is not anything that she could ever have imagined. On rare occasions she might have hoped that her parents were decent but even that was hard for her to believe. It is impossible for her to deal with the fact that her parents exceed decent by a long shot, that they are literally fairytale heroes. Cursed fairytale heroes.

She is cursed too. She was as much a victim of the curse as anyone else. It robbed her of her identity just as it did all of the residents of Storybrooke and when she looks at the differences between Mary Margaret and Snow White she wonders what else it took from her. It is clear that she would be different person if she’d been raised by her parents in their strange land. This really is the core of her problem. An entire land placed their hopes and dreams in a child but that child doesn’t exist anymore. 

Whatever her heritage, she is not a princess. She may have been born to lead but she doesn’t want to lead this bunch of strangers. She wants Mary Margaret back, not this strange person who looks exactly like Mary Margaret but wants Emma to call her ‘Mom’. 

Snow does have her advantages. She was willing to attack one of their captors in an effort to help them escape and if Snow hadn’t have attacked the wraith Regina would be dead right now.

Emma doesn’t want to think about that. She doesn’t want to think about Regina at all. It hurts too much. Emma can handle the fact that Regina is an evil queen. It doesn’t even change things all that much. She always suspected that Regina was evil and that didn’t stop her falling for the mayor. The queen part is a bit more of a surprise but if Emma is a princess then it’s fitting that her lover is a queen. It’s even in keeping with the power differential that always existed between them.

The situation with her parents is actually more complicated than the one with Regina. When she watched her fellow captive get struck and fall to the ground she didn’t she her mother, she feared for her friend. There isn’t this split with Regina. The Regina she knew in Storybrooke wasn’t cursed, well not in the way the other residents of the town were, the Regina Emma knew was real and she wants to get back to her. 

Snow and Charming may be delighted to have their family reunited but they are not her family. She already had a family of sorts, she had Henry and she had Regina, and as dysfunctional as it may have been it was the only family she had ever known. More than that she had believed that it was a family that she selected. She’s not so sure about that now. 

She has no idea what her role was meant to be in the breaking of the curse but it apparently wasn’t as simple as her turning up in Storybrooke. The curse only broke because she grew to love Henry and Henry should never have been a part of that world. His placement there was by design and it’s hard to her to get her head around that. 

Emma broke the curse, as it was foreseen that she would, because she stayed in a town for a child who should never have been there. Maybe Henry’s fate was as predetermined as her own. Maybe they were both born in order to break the curse. It’s a terrifying possibility and one that she doesn’t like. She has made mistakes and shit decisions but at least they were own mistakes, her own shit decisions. Now she has to wonder if that is true. Maybe every step she ever took in her life was simply to lead her to a dead child in a hospital bed.

That line of thinking has ramifications for everything, even Regina. Emma stayed as much for Regina as she did for Henry. Sometimes even more so. If she had have been stronger, if she had have just been able to leave with Henry as planned, the curse never would have broken. That suggests that Regina was as integral to the breaking of the curse as her or Henry. Of the three of them at least Regina can be comforted by the fact that she had a life before the curse.

It’s creepy and distressing to think that everything she holds dear may have been manipulated, may have been nothing but tools to place in the saviour’s hand in order to ensure that the curse broke. It makes her feel that Regina is right – that Gold is so much worse than Regina. 

In a way Regina’s evilness is overt. She demands it be noticed. She wears it as she does her expensive clothes but Emma is not sure that it is an outfit Regina wears by choice. Emma suspects that in a way Regina hates that part of herself. Regina speaks favourably, if not reverently, of the girl she was and at times Emma feels that Regina would give up everything if she could go back in time and be that girl again.

Gold is not like that. He’s nefarious but what makes him truly evil is the way he tries to hide what he is. She trusted him over Regina simply because he bothered to lie. Not just lie, he told her what she wanted to hear. She was reeling from everything that she had learnt and high on that list was the fact that she had kissed Regina even though she was a diabolically evil murderess. Emma had wanted to believe that she had nothing real with Regina and the idea that Regina had abandoned her to her death fit nicely into that picture. Gold only needed to speak ill of Regina and she was willing to swallow his poisonous lies.

She was worried that once the curse broke she wouldn’t be able to fix things with Regina, wouldn’t be able to make up for her lack of faith, but she no longer thinks that is the case. If she had been allowed to stay they would have worked things out. Protecting Regina against the mob and the wraith would have gone a long way towards repaying her debt but it’s the very thing that brought her here that makes her certain that they would have been ok.

That hat didn’t spin because Regina had finally got some rusty joints working and managed to use her powers. The portal opened because she touched Regina. She had never felt anything like it. She could taste the power and it was intoxicating. It was easy to understand how someone could become a slave to it but there was more happening than just raw power. There was a merging. Energy that wasn’t related to the hat flowed between them and the only word she can think of to define that feeling is love. It’s probably not exactly the right word but it is the best that she has. They were together, they were joined, they were love. 

They were literally more powerful together than they were apart and it makes her wonder if Gold saw all parts of his plan. Maybe she is right and Regina was meant to help her break the curse but because of different reasons. Gold expected her to turn on Regina. He trusted that she would give up the prize that she had slain a dragon for in a fit of anger directed at the mayor. 

It is clear that Gold thought that Regina would provoke strong emotions but perhaps the emotions he had in mind were along the lines of hatred and blood lust. It gives her hope that not all of her life was written in advance. Maybe Gold was as blind as her parents in the thought that she could be sent away and return as the child the prophecy was written about. 

The daughter of Snow and Charming would have hated Regina. She would have stayed in order to thwart Regina and to steal her son back. She would have automatically sided with Gold over Regina in order to save her son’s life. That daughter is not Emma Swan. Emma Swan has far more in common with Regina Mills than she ever will with her parents. They are both damaged, broken, dark things who need one another. They are better together than they ever were alone. She doubts Gold understands any of this. He, like everyone else, saw her as the person who would destroy Regina and not as the person who would give Regina power.

Emma is glad she is not the princess she was meant to be. Glad she has changed. The princess would not have been able to see the scarred beauty of Regina and that would have been a great loss. She will find a way to get back to Regina because that is where she is meant to be. She might be stuck in a prison right now but she has endured this before and she knows that there is nothing here that she can’t handle.


End file.
